MarkLogic: XQuery - Notes on Return Types

Here are some brief notes and examples of specific return types in XQuery:


local:gen-string returns an xs:string. Not that uncommon, although I include this example here to demonstrate another way to concatenate in XQuery; this is something I often use with xdmp:log statements:


Functions which write elements and attributes can be tasked to return those specific types, like so:

However, as elements and attributes are nodes, it's also possible to make a function which returns a node(). This example will return an element containing one attribute:

In the above example, you could also return the content as an element(), but there are definite places where returning an element can be very useful. This example demonstrates a function which returns an element with a given name (which I've rather unimaginatively named 'blah' for this example).

Such an example may be useful for situations where you really want to be specific about the kind of content a function can return:

Example usage:

Finally, here's an example of a function which returns another specific type of node: a document-node() representing a document which is stored in the database:

Example usage: